This thesis attempts to gauge the strengths and limitations of the Java programming language in terms of its use in the production of multimedia compositions: in particular, the ways in which Java supports the creation of interactive, non-deterministic musical works.…

Java provides many attractive features such as platform independence, execution safety, garbage collection and object orientation. These features facilitate application development but are expensive to support; applications written in Java are often much slower than their counterparts written in C…

Nondeterminism makes distributed concurrent systems difficult to test, monitor and control. An execution of a message-passing system is nondeterministic when message races exist. Message race occurs when, e.g., multiple conflicting requests from different clients are competing to be executed within…

In this thesis, we present a cognitive theory of object-oriented metrics and an empirical study which has as objectives to formally test this theory while validating the metrics and to build a post-release fault proneness prediction model. The four cognitive…

Despite the popularity of Java, problems may arise from potential data-race conditionsduring execution of a Java program. Data-races are considered errors in concurrent pro-gramming languages and greatly complicate both programming and runtime optimizationefforts. A race-free version of Java is therefore…

This thesis presents a novel idea for object allocation, cache line reservation (CLR), whose goal is to reduce data cache misses. Certain objects are allocated from "reserved" cache lines, so that they do not evict other objects that will be…

To achieve the best performance, most computer languages are compiled, either ahead of time and statically, or dynamically during runtime by means of a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. Optimizing compilers are complex, however, and for many languages such as Ruby, Python,…

Speculative multithreading (SpMT), also known as thread level speculation (TLS), is a dynamic parallelization technique that relies on out-of-order execution, dependence buffering, and misspeculation rollback to achieve speedup of sequential programs on multiprocessors. A large number of hardware studies have…

My dissertation explores the eclectic singing careers of sisters Eva and Juliette Gauthier. Born in Ottawa, Eva and Juliettte were aided in their musical aspirations by the patronage of Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier and his wife Lady Zoë. They both…

Numerous techniques mine change data captured in software archives to assist software engineering efforts. These change-based approaches typically analyze change sets -- groups of co-committed changes -- under the assumption that the development work represented by change sets is both…